Listening: The First Response to Racism
Prejudice against a person’s race is not confined to one country or culture, nor is it a new phenomenon. But this spring’s agonizing death of George Floyd, witnessed by the world via video, at the hands (and knees) of police, resulted in a world-wide firestorm of protest and violence. New York Times columnist David Brooks, [...]
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Racism from the Inside Out: Toward Reconciliation and Cure
Invited to offer my commentary on racism, I do so from the view of an interracial counselor/trainer with much experience in the U.S. and elsewhere. Global listener herein refers to those ascribing to the ideals and definition of listening set forth by the Global Listening Centre. Why would racism be of import to the global [...]
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Global Listening: The Challenge of the Mixed Message
Global listening1 is a contextualized or multimodal approach. It involves being attuned to the totality of verbal and nonverbal inputs. Let’s consider how the mixed message can derail otherwise effective listening, an illustration meant as a small contribution to the field of listening. Take Box 12 by way of illustration:This person a distraught loner smiles [...]
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Centering Risk Communication on Active Listening
“Pockets of U.S. Still Resisting Urgent Mantra to Stay at Home” read a front page headline in The Washington Post on April 3. Indeed, a major challenge of managing the horrific health and economic consequences of the Coronavirus epidemic has been to convince people throughout the world to take seriously the need to social distance. [...]
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Listening in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Ignoring What We Listen to May Not Be Our Fault
Abstract Some scholars in the field of Communication have tended to largely focus on the production of utterances and the effective creation of informative and persuasive speeches, interpersonal, intercultural, business, and other types of communication, sometimes controlled by the sender of a message. Subsequently, these areas are often taught to the exclusion of listening as [...]
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The Spirituality of Listening
What is the relationship of spirituality to listening? How does this relationship fit into our understanding of communication? Why is it important? For over twenty-two years, the premise of my work has been that listening is a sacred art and a spiritual practice. Even though historically these terms have most frequently been ascribed to religion, [...]
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Ethical Listening…Do You Hear What I Hear?
In my current (nearly two decades now!) role as a Communication professor, I emphasize to my students—especially those enrolled in my Public Relations courses—the critical importance of listening to those who have an interest in your organization’s activities and ensuring that their concerns are addressed appropriately. British philosopher George Edward Moore said it so clearly [...]
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I hear you : Comments on the Sound Practice of Listening
Typically, hearing is contrasted to listening, and such comparisons almost always favor listening. This dichotomy substitutes for the more complex understanding that there is no single type of listening, but rather, to employ a technique derived from general semantics, we can say that there are multiple varieties of listenings.
Listening and Not Listening to Voices of Women Who Worked as Maids in the Jim Crow South
Abstract. This article discusses the art and science of listening. The focus is on listening, with an emphasis on the personal narrative which can take us into others’ lives, into their feeling memories, as they describe what they saw, heard, tasted, and smelled in another place, another time. The voices are those of storytellers who [...]
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Can We Communicate without Listening?
Dr Margarita K. Kefalaki President, Communication Institute of Greece View
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